In the dedicatory epistle to Sir Henry Ashurst, prefixed to his biography of his own father, the great nonconformist divine Matthew Henry wrote this of the church’s ministers:
The ministers of the gospel are, in the Scripture language, stars in the right hand of Christ, to signify their diffusive light, and beneficial influences. As in the future state of the resurrection, some stars shall differ from others in glory; so in the present state of the regeneration, some ministers are distinguish’d from others, by a brighter eminence in their endowments, and a more powerful emanation of light in their preaching.[1]
Such a minister, Henry says, was his father. But what were those endowments from which flowed his father’s “brighter eminence”? Perhaps a well-trafficked blog? A book deal with a popular evangelical publisher? A febrile semester teaching an adjunct course for a seminary?
No; Henry was chiefly impressed by the fact that his father had “consecrated all the powers of his soul, understanding, memory, will and affections, with his time and strength to the service of Christ.”[2] From this consecration had flowed his father’s eminence.
The truth is that a PhD can’t do this work for you. In fact, it easily becomes that to which you consecrate all your powers, whether in the throes of research, or in the quieter years when that academic calling card is burning a hole in your pocket, while old doctoral buddies put it to more obvious use.
However, for some, earning a PhD can serve as a decisive expression of our self-consecration—a reckoning with our vocation before God. For me, the process of determining that my PhD would serve as a ministerial sign of self-consecration involved four components. Each was crucial for arriving at the conclusion that training at Cambridge was the road to becoming the particular minister God created me to be.
First, I understood that, unlike the German and American models, the British doctorate is about forging researchers, people who come out not only with something new to say, but who have developed within themselves the faculty of uttering new things. For all the obvious reasons, this can be a liability for the pastor. In a sermon at St Bene’t’s in Cambridge, a preacher once joked that if you stick around Cambridge long enough, someone’s sure to interrupt you with a raised eyebrow, saying, “I rather doubt it.” The last thing the church needs is more pastors like that! Nevertheless, studying ecclesiastical history at Cambridge has enabled me to see not only how things change over time; in fact, it has trained me to expect that things are often different in different ways than I might have expected. At worst a constant retreat to nuance, at best this habit of thinking is what you might call intellectual patience, which, when consecrated to Christ, becomes an expression of the virtue of humility.
Second, I saw that any serious work in the field of ecclesiastical history, undertaken without the PhD, was sure to be easily dismissed. This is lamentable, and reflects the fact that over the last century the PhD model has become vastly over-vascularized. Freeman Dyson and C.S. Lewis didn’t have PhD’s! Of course, Lewis lived in the last generation when an MA could work at that scholarly level; and Dyson may be the exception that proves the rule. But it is worth considering whether the general over-emphasis on acquiring doctorates in secular academia indicates not that we are expecting too much of keen students, but that we expect too little of all students. At any rate, to be taken seriously by academic counterparts as an active student of ecclesiastical history, the PhD would be necessary.
Third, I desired to provide a voice for Anglicans beyond my own local church, and so I went to Cambridge with the explicit goal of returning to the US, where, as a minister in the Anglican Church in North America (like other brethren here at the CPT), I could help to provide a historically and theologically sensitive perspective on the development of our young province, and its place within a non-Canterbury centric Anglican world. Vanity, vanity, utter vanity! Nevertheless, I remain convinced that God called me to Cambridge to join similarly gifted brethren in the work of enriching our province, both pastorally, and in the provision of devoted historical and theological research and teaching.
Fourth, and flowing from this, I understood instinctively that a Cambridge PhD would enable me to envision and participate in models of creative, local theological education in a new educational context when traditional higher theological education is facing serious (in some cases fatal) challenges. In this new milieu, the local church plays the central role. As Ephraim Radner has pointed out in a provocative essay at First Things, an unchartered cultural landscape provides both an enormous challenge to existing modes of theological instruction, and yet reveals exhilarating possibilities for theological renewal, reengineered at the local level, and characterized by the disciplines of (in a very general sense) ressourcement and return ad fontes. Cambridge – and even more particularly, my doktorvater, Stephen Hampton – enabled me to supplement my industry with deep learning, both of which will be essential to pass on, in an irreducibly ecclesial educational context, what Radner calls “the fundamentals.”
These were the main reasons that I awoke every morning for four years and climbed back on the altar, to consecrate all the powers of my soul, understanding, memory, will and affections, with my time and strength, to the service of Christ. They’re still the reasons I believe Cambridge was necessary for me to serve well in my vocation as a pastor-theologian.
Sam Fornecker serves as the Associate Rector at the Church of the Incarnation in Harrisonburg, VA. He holds an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Seminary and a PhD in Ecclesiastical History from Cambridge University. He is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
